Trentonian editorial: Fiction of the year

Our pick for Fiction of the Year won’t be found on any best seller list. It’s a hardy perennial: The Social Security — trumpet flourish, please — "Trust Fund.”

When folks wonder about the future of Social Security, many politicians say, hey, don’t sweat it, there always the Social Security Trust Fund to fall back on.

Makes it sound like we’re all Kennedy heirs or something. With fewer and fewer paying into Social Security as more and more receive checks out of Social Security, it’s comforting to know there’s money socked away in the trust fund earning dividends and interest. As Mad Magazine’s coverboy says, “What, me worry?”

Yes, you — worry. Here’s the official word from President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget: The vaunted Trust Fund is, well, um, er, sort of a fiction. The Trust Fund consists of IOUs that the government promises to pay itself, eventually.

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We don’t point this out as part of some right-wing conspiracy to undermine Social Security or to suggest that it’s anything less than essential. We merely point out the program can’t be sustained by fiscal hocus-pocus. Or by politicians’ BS.

The OMB adds that unlike real trust funds with invested assets supervised by trustees who have legally enforceable fiduciary obligations, Social Security’s “trust” funds — and here we quote — “do not” — repeat NOT — “consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.”

The Social Security Trust Fund fast talk follows in the fast-talk tradition of having named the Social Security payroll tax the “Federal Insurance Contribution Act.” If a business person represented such an arrangement as “insurance,” the Feds would come down on him with all their might. As they would come down on any business person palming off a something as a “trust fund” when it ain’t.

Future Social Security benefits, adds the OMB, won’t be magically saved by tapping the Trust Fund. They “will have to be financed by raising (payroll) taxes, borrowing from the public or reducing benefits or other expenditures.”

Remember these words the next time you hear Congressman Alfred E. Neuman say, “What, me worry?”